Today I got to celebrate my UAA tenure and promotion. Very grateful for friends, family, and my professional network for their support over the years.

AI does have some good use cases!

Alaska's manufacturing employment in May was 9,200 jobs, the lowest level of May employment in that industry in at least 24 years. Seafood getting pummeled.

Meanwhile, on the west coast:

Man. That correlation is not great.

Interesting stats on attendance at United Methodist Churches in Alaska.

Before accounting for the PFD....
cfo.dc.gov/sites/defaul...

This is the first time I've seen snowbirding quantified with administrative data, and the first time I've seen absentee data from PFD applications used for any research purpose. Cool!
live.laborstats.alaska.gov/trends-magaz...

Official now. After nearly a decade, Alaska hits new ATH level of employment.

UAA is hiring in Business Analytics, open to Econ applicants.

(Photo of a recent fly out)

Alaska is on the cusp of a huge milestone. Despite a decade of population stagnation + oil prices/production 20% lower, SA employment is about to hit an all-time-high.

Today my ISER colleague Bob Leoffler presented on Impact Benefit Agreements in hard rock mining. Intuitively, the benefits that communities are able to secure are a function of their property rights but also their institutional capacity.

The long run trends in Alaska seafood values are interesting/divergent by species. The emergence of farmed salmon has depressed prices, even while run sizes have remained mostly stable. Halibut and crab volumes have basically collapsed, but price increases have kept those fisheries viable.

PS: The first time I (and I suspect others) learned that Alaska had a citizen dividend paid from its oil wealth fund was this scene from the Simpsons movie. The most important pop culture reference to the Alaska PFD explicitly links it to migration!

This result holds for high and low income households, employed and unemployed, and liberal and conservative respondents.

New working paper about unconditional cash transfers and migration from me and Alex James.

It's a stated preference experiment on individuals willingness to move for different types of place-specific fiscal incentives (cash transfers, taxes, wages).

www.econpapers.uaa.alaska.edu/RePEC/ala/wp...